I just finished Ken Doctor’s Newsonomics book and took note of several items, that I wanted to touch upon over a couple of posts, in the next coming weeks.

The first commentary I have, is the somewhat immediate need for online news media publishing metrics standards. Let me provide a simple set of offline publishing metrics, a set of quotes that show lack of standards and finally a suggestion on how we could perhaps look at this instead. All with the intent of moving us forward.

For as long as we can remember, Circulation in many ways defined the health of news media, such as daily newspapers or weekly news magazines. Circulation being the SUM of copies distributed to subscribers plus copies picked up at newsstands etc. However; a circulation count does not equal a Readership count, as most publishers will take into consideration that every copy is read by more than one person. If you agree on this layout, we then have a set of basic offline publishing metrics that look like this:

• Subscriber = Customers paying for a publication
• Circulation = SUM of copies distributed to Subscribers + SUM of Unsubscribed copies picked up
• Readership = Circulation * Count of people reading it on average

The above offline publishing metrics are fairly easy to understand, even though you probably, like me, spend most your day around online specific metrics. Please note that the concept of paying for, does not necessarily equal a payment in money. I identified earlier, that a newsreader is likely to pay in one of three currencies.

The first decent question is likely to be, If we are ever to compare offline to online; does the above three basic offline metrics even translate into a set of online publisher metrics or specifically online news media publisher metrics? Before we consider if that’s possible, and even a valid question, I would like to present a few quotes (beginning with one from Ken’s Newsonomics book.)

Ken Doctor quotes Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc.

- “She made the point that every Sports Illustrated print subscriber is worth $118 a year to the magazine, mainly in advertising. Every SI.com customer, though, is only worth $5 per year”

In trying to understand the above quote, and assuming an error in using the metric, Customer, I looked up a previous quote from Ken:

- “I keep coming back to the numbers recently laid out by Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Each Sports Illustrated paid reader is worth $118 a year, mainly in advertising, while each SI.com visitor fetches a measly $5”

The  above quote then again links and reference the following quote from a Forbes article:

- “In 2006 Sports Illustrated generated about $118 in revenue for every person who paid for the print magazine, compared to $5 per online reader.”

Feeling a tad unsure on the legitimacy of the above metrics, I wanted to see if Ann Moore was quoted elsewhere, and Rafat Ali did indeed do an interview which was published on paid content, and in it you find the following quote:

- “The average reader of Sports Illustrated delivers about $118 to the bottom line in Time Inc. The average very engaged user of SI.com can generate about $5 in advertising contribution”

I am sure you, the web analyst, see a pattern, and with that pattern a number of issues. Some of those issues might even make the above $118 versus $5 incomparable, and render it invaluable, beyond the ability to use it as a punch line.

First. Let’s have a look at the 4 quotes and their accompanying 2 supposedly comparable metrics – and as they all reference the same set of proofs, they should essentially be identical.

• subscriber
• paid reader
• every person who paid
• average reader
• customer
• visitor
• online reader
• average very engaged user

I am not sure, if given this list, that I would immediately conclude that any number given for any of the above metrics would or should align, to the point where I could compare performance amongst them. If anything, this list shows that there is indeed a need for metric standardization, at least to the minimum of agreeing on a shared vocabulary. Trying to be a bit more fair, I paired up the metrics, as they were presented in the 4 quotes above:

• subscriber = customer
• paid reader = visitor
• every person who paid = online reader
• average reader = average very engaged user

Given these 4 metric comparisons alone, I would not be able to say that they reference the same subject. Beyond the obvious difference in-between them, we also have the actual issue of trying to e.g. equal a paid reader and a visitor. I believe I know what a paid reader is (Subscriber) and I am quite confident in knowing what a Visitor is. BUT I am also very confident in saying that those two are not the same – and that translation from the offline Subscriber to an online Subscriber is not done by just using a Visitor metric. If anything, and this certainly needs more work, one should align the following:

• Offline Subscribers = Online Users
• Offline Readership = Online Visitors

Where online users could be as firm as an online subscription to e.g. the Financial Times (which makes for a very good comparison to offline subscribers of the paper). But Online users could also be the SUM of Feed and Fan subscribers to e.g. the New York Daily News (who has a more ad driven monetization model).

Please note that I am not disputing the values per say, I am however a bit hesitant in believing the off-line $118 amount compared to the $5 amount being of any real analytical value.

Again, the book is great and it got me thinking about a number of issue.

In conclusion and as I continue down the rabbit hole, trying to figure out how Data and Analytics can help publishers increase their current performance. Standardization might not look like much of a performance or optimization technique, but not knowing clearly what your are optimizing against, makes the task not only difficult, but also dangerous to the point where you can make more harm than good on certain initiatives. So the laissez-faire metric attitude, should be exchanged for well defined and understood online publisher metrics.

Cheers – AND finally a post where picking the thumbnail picture took longer than writing the post ;-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)